Steve Jobs and Apple taught us that profit is not the ultimate goal, but rather a consequence of something greater.

If you take away religion, you can't hire enough police.

Often they [writers on the study of management] have a point of view based upon intuition and experience. They then offer a cadence of two-paragraph examples carefully selected to "prove" their theory, and then they write "one size fits all" books. The message is, "If you'd do what these companies did, you'd be successful too."

In my first career I had founded my own company, with a group of MIT professors, before coming to Harvard to finish my doctorate, and so I had a deep respect for the brains, talent, and dedication of managers. That made it hard for me to believe the attributions in the business press that stupid management was to blame. So I looked elsewhere for an explanation.

This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.